Jill Rees: Welcome Press

In the last 2 weeks, US planes have bombed towns in Pakistan, claiming that there are ‘Al Qaida’ forces hidden among the locals. These ‘terrorists’ have crossed from Afghanistan where the US troops are, rather astonishingly perhaps, legitimately at war.

The Afghanistan question, as it happens, was a second invasion led by Bush’n’Blair, sanctioned somewhat reluctantly by the United Nations Security Council, whose Headquarters are in New York.  From the point of view of the TV-watching public, Tony Blair persuaded us that we had to get in there and enable women to liberate themselves from the headscarf.

To date, despite several towns being annihilated and innumerable civilian deaths, not one woman seems to have taken off the headscarf.  In fact in Turkey, where women are required by law to remove the headscarf at work, they endlessly protest the right to keep it on!

Putting details and civilian deaths to one side, the reason for the war in Afghanistan is that the brains behind 9/11, Osama Bin Laden, is supposed to be holed up in a cave in the Afghani desert, and the Afghani and Pakistani people refuse to blow his cover.

Osama Bin Laden disguised as God  

Bin Laden’s group, ‘Al Qaida’ then, led by a man in a cave, seems to have long arms, stretching as it does from Pakistan on the Indian subcontinent to Western Sahara on the Atlantic coast of Africa. A recent shooting on the main highway in Mauritania was blamed on Al Qaida factions ‘trained in Algeria’. (Clue – Algeria produces oil). The perpetrators turned out to be a group of local unemployed lads who were in a gang, had just left one of their grandfathers’ house where they had been staying. A tragic, but straightforward murder, and the police quickly caught the criminals. This didn’t stop the US Press having a field day.

There, in the Sahel, on the edge of the vast sands where men can hide, ancient peoples travel and trade with their camels, anarchic and ill-fit to our CCC-TV eye all-seeing world.  Driving through the area myself, I saw buildings disguised as local Arab and Berber hangars and habitations. You could tell they were false because they all stood in line, and were clean and modern. A good place to store tanks, I thought to myself. Then I saw a sign hammered sardonically by the road: ‘Baghdad 2’. I was surprised to find US troops slinking around the desert, until I heard about the money that had been pumped into Mauritania.

Between the shifting sand –dunes, hidden somewhere between the oil wells and water holes, lies the Algerian border. Algeria is one of the fastest economically enriching nations of the world, because of its oil reserves. The CIA constantly insinuates that there are ‘Al Qaida’ forces in Algeria, hiding in the desert, ignoring experts on the area such as Jeremy Keenan, who accuse the Americans of muck-raking in fact, the people of the western Sahara loath Al Qaida and all things Arabic, having been invaded by the ruthless Arab Empire in the 7^th century. Memories are long in the desert, and I would be surprised to see a Berber or a Touareg who is sympathetic to an Arab cause. But then, I didn’t think the Arabs who rule Mauritania would be snuggling so closely to George Bush either, so who am I to judge?

My question is: who are these ‘Al Qaida’ groups who keep popping up everywhere? Let’s look at the evidence.

Bearded and robed, ruling with seemingly infinite power over the entire world, threatening to destroy whole swathes of civilisation because of its decadence and sin. It rules its earth mission from an invisible and untraceable cave in the desert, communicating with men through the disembodied technology of radio and video broadcast.  

To my mind, reports about the ‘Axis of Evil’ and the ‘Terror’  bear astonishing resemblances to the Bible story of Sodom and Gomorrah, where God couldn’t put up with human beings seeking only pleasure, wealth and material treasures, instead of the more spiritual treasures of the heart, any longer.

Global capitalists surely have forsaken religious and moral tenets. The West is under siege again from that mysterious condemnation from the desert. Worst of all, it feels as if it is true, as we pile our hard earned taxes into saving the big banks. (Does anyone else want a tee-shirt blazing ‘Marx was right’, selling like hot cakes on ebay?)

Instead of the Lord himself booming out in righteous indignations against our folly from the desert wastes, we have bin Laden’s crackly videotaped messages, his word of damnation the technological version of God. Once again, man has invented God in his own image, the image of his guilt. Oh but look what we are thinking we look like deep down!

Could it be that the leaders of the West, men who claim to be Christian in the main, yet clearly fail to act on the morals so clearly stated in their religion, have subconsciously created a terrorising, punishing all-powerful wrathful being that they are at the mercy of, but is, in reality, the echo of their own ragged conscience?

‘I am a jealous God’, says the voice George Bush and Tony Blair both claim to hear on those long dark nights of indecision, ‘You cannot worship both global greed and worship me’. In their masochistic (some have said homoerotic) obsession, the cause of the ‘war on terror’ is not some Oxbridge dropout from a wealthy family weakly lying on his sickbed in some peasant’s hut, but the terror which is the conscience of the real evil men of the present time.

As George Bush exits centre stage, with Blair already gone, we can only reflect that we are well rid of them, and hope that Obama, who understands Africa, can make more sense out of the world, for all our sakes.

980 words

 Jill Rees

04 November 2008

Related posts

• Who is Jill Rees? (0)
• Which death? (1)
• What it was like back then . (0)
• What Headscarf? (0)
• Update (0)

Tags: Al Qaida, Algeria, George Bush, Leadership, Mauritania, Osama Bin Laden, Sahara, US policy